incorruptible body

An incorruptible body is a whole human body or part of a human body
that allegedly does not decay after death because of some supernatural
power giving it immutability.

The Catholic
Church claims there are many incorruptible bodies and that they are
divine signs of the holiness of the persons whose bodies they used to be.
Perhaps, but they are more likely signs of careful or lucky burial,
combined
with ignorance regarding the factors that affect rate of
decay. Some alleged cases of incorruptibility border on the
piously fraudulent. For example, a
television program showed a corpse in a case of
a very lifelike woman the narrator said was the preserved body of St. Teresa
of Avila who died in 1582. The corpse was actually that of St. Bernadette Soubirous, who died in 1879. A photo of her
corpse can be seen on the cover of a book called
The Incorruptibles, which claims the body has been "preserved
intact since 1879 without embalming or other artificial means." Actually,
the face and hands that look so real in the photo are made out of wax. The
wax was added because the face was "emaciated" when the body was first exhumed (Nickell
1993: 92). Perhaps St. Bernadette's corpse should be moved to
Madame Tussauds.

Some of these alleged saintly incorruptibles have exuded a
sweet odor when exhumed. The faithful take this as a sign of divine
intervention; the knowledgeable take it as a sign of embalming fluids and
ointments.

In addition to numerous saints whose various body
parts are kept in reliquaries and venerated by the faithful as proof of
life after death or some god's existence or some such thing, there are secular
examples that are equally dramatic. For example, the severed head of King Charles I of England was exhumed
after 165 years and according to the royal surgeon Sir Henry Halford

The complexion of the skin was dark and
discolored. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of their
muscular substance; the cartilage of the nose was gone; but the left
eye, in the first moment of exposure, was open and full, though it
vanished almost immediately: and the pointed beard, so characteristic of
this period of the reign of King Charles, was perfect. [The head] was
quite wet, and gave a greenish-red tinge to paper and to linen which
touched it. The back part of the scalp . . . had a remarkably fresh
appearance. The hair was thick . . . and in appearance nearly black. . .
.*

The preserved head was due to accident and had more to do with how it
was buried at St. George's Chapel in Windsor than to any special holiness
of Charles I.

In 1952, there was a well-publicized case of an Indian Hindu in
California who entered mahasamdhi
and whose body, it was claimed, seemed incorruptible. Paramahansa
Yogananda was the founder of the Self-Realization
Fellowship, which claims that

On March 7, 1952, Paramahansa Yogananda entered
mahasamadhi....His passing was marked by an extraordinary
phenomenon. A notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn
Memorial-Park testified: "No physical disintegration was visible in
his body even twenty days after death....This state of perfect
preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an
unparalleled one....Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal
state of immutability."

The statement of the director of Forest Lawn, Harry T. Rowe, is accurate,
but incomplete. Mr. Rowe also mentioned that he observed a brown spot on
Yogananda's nose after 20 days, a sign that the body was not "perfectly"
preserved. In any case,
the SRF's claim that lack of physical disintegration is "an
extraordinary phenomenon" is misleading. (One wonders how much
digging into the mortuary annals they did. Very little, I imagine.) The
state of the yogi's body is not unparalleled, but common. A typical
embalmed body will show no notable desiccation for one to five months
after burial without the use of refrigeration or creams to mask odors.
According to Jesus Preciado, who has been in the mortuary business for
thirty years, "in general, the less pronounced the pathology [at the
time of death], the less notable are the symptoms of necrosis." Some
bodies are well-preserved for years after burial (personal correspondence,
Mike Drake). Some, under extraordinary conditions, are well-preserved for hundreds,
even thousands,
of years.

Immutable human bodies are ultimately cases of apparent
immutability. All human bodies and body parts disintegrate with time
unless they are preserved with embalming fluids or waxes, or by special conditions such as alkaline soil, absence of oxygen,
bacteria, worms, heat, light, and the like. There are many cases of such
burials and bodies, known as
adipocere.
Some corpses are "saponified (in which burial in lime-impregnated soil
converts the body fat into a hard soap that resists putrefaction)" (Nickell
1996). And some corpses are preserved by nature, like that of Otzi the Iceman of Bolzano.